Twenty eight years ago, on this day May 12, 1995, the bet between those who think Technology Will Save Us and those who think that, you know, there are limits, kept going.
The Simon APS News article offers to bet environmentalists “…that any trend in material human welfare will improve rather than get worse.” This article echoes an editorial essay entitled “Earth’s Doomsayers Are Wrong” that appeared in the 12 May 1995 San Francisco Chronicle open forum. Simon then said that “Every measure of material and environmental welfare in the U.S. and the world has improved…” and that “All long run trends point in exactly the opposite direction of the doomsayers” Thus he implied that few, if any people would likely accept his bet since for the past 25 years the pessimists have been “proven entirely wrong.” When my Stanford colleague, Paul Ehrlich, and I took up his challenge1 and named 15 environment-related trends we were willing to bet would deteriorate, Simon refused claiming to the Chronicle (18 May 1995) that “I do not offer to bet on the progress of particular physical conditions such as the ozone layer” (as if its decline were not a negative measure of environmental welfare!).
Schneider – https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199608/environmental.cfm
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 363.8ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that in March 1995 the first meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change “conference of the parties” (COP) was about to happen in Berlin. So, everyone was thinking about the future of climate action. Julian Simon, a cornucopian, had been taking bets with Paul Ehrlich and others and winning them. Simon’s bets were useful just-so stories for “owning the libs,” as we now call it, for generations of what’s the polite word … idiots.
What I think we can learn from this
You can be really smart and dumb as a rock at the same time especially if you you have an inability, for psychological reasons, to accept the basic fact that there are indeed limits on human ingenuity and the capacity of ecosystems to absorb damage.
What happened next
Julian Simon died without ever seeing his bets for what they were. And sadly Steven Schneider died when we needed him most.
The atmospheric CO2 kept accumulating and the damage has kept accumulating.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.